The Village Trip Mission Statement
The Village Trip Mission StatementTo uplift, to entertain and to celebrate the arts for all New Yorkers, their families and all people from around the world who come to visit Downtown Manhattan’s special oases, Greenwich Village and the East Village.
The Village Trip Team
LIZ THOMSON, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of The Village Trip, and the festival’s Joint Artistic Director, was born and raised in London, has long been fascinated by Greenwich Village, an area she has come to know well over two decades of visiting, always staying at the Washington Square Hotel. The idea for The Village Trip sprang from her work on the restoration of the late New York Times journalist Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home (2011), which chronicles in vivid detail the 1960s Village scene. She is a widely published journalist and a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on platforms at literary festivals around the world as an interviewer. Her books include critically acclaimed collections on John Lennon, Bob Dylan and David Bowie, co-edited with David Gutman; Chickenshed – An Awfully Big Adventure, a study of the ground-breaking London theatre company; and the award-winning biography Joan Baez: The Last Leaf.
A contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, she has lectured at Liverpool University’s Institute of Popular Music and been a Visiting Fellow of the Open University Sixties Research Group. Her essay on David Amram was published in the collection The Many Worlds of David Amram: Renaissance Man of American Music (2023).
Find out more about Liz at www.lizthomson.co.uk
Contact: LizThomson@thevillagetrip.com | (00) 44 7799 503414
CLIFFORD PEARSON, Joint Artistic Director, has lived in Greenwich Village for more than 30 years and loves its crooked streets and quirky ways. He writes about architecture, urbanism, and culture for many publications, and serves as a contributing editor at Architectural Record, where he had been on staff for 26 years. From 2018 through 2020, he was the editorial director of Kohn Pedersen Fox, and from 2016 to 2018, he was the director of the University of Southern California’s American Academy in China and a lecturer at the USC School of Architecture. He serves as a director of Asia Design Forum, a nonprofit think tank that organizes events and generates dialogue among the design community and the general public.
He is a co-editor of Tips from the Top: Architects Share Their Advice for Success, which will be published by Chronicle Books in March 2025, and the co-author, with A Eugene Kohn, of The World By Design: The Story of a Global Architecture Firm, published by Rosetta Books in 2019. He wrote Indonesia: Design and Culture, published by the Monacelli Press in 1998, and edited Modern American Houses, published by Harry N Abrams, Inc, in 1996. He has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, New York, and Metropolis.
He is a co-editor of Tips from the Top: Architects Share Their Advice for Success, which will be published by Chronicle Books in March 2025, and the co-author, with A Eugene Kohn, of The World By Design: The Story of a Global Architecture Firm, published by Rosetta Books in 2019. He wrote Indonesia: Design and Culture, published by the Monacelli Press in 1998, and edited Modern American Houses, published by Harry N Abrams, Inc, in 1996. He has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, New York, and Metropolis.
Contact: CliffPearson@thevillagetrip.com
WILLIAM ANDERSON, Joint Director of Classical and New Music, is a guitarist, composer, teacher, and chair of the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music. He has toured internationally with a repertoire that ranges from Albeniz to Zappa and directed concerts and festivals around the world. With his ensemble, Cygnus, he has shown how significant a role the guitar has in chamber music, performing many landmark works and commissioning new ones.
JOAN FORSYTH, Joint Director of Classical and New Music, is an award-winning pianist with a wide repertoire and particular interest in new American music, she has toured the world as both soloist and ensemble performer, working with the Cassatt Quartet, the Stein Hall Players, and Cygnus, among many others. She chairs the piano department at the Third Street Music School Settlement and has a special interest in early childhood education.
JUDY PAUL and MARC GARRETT Co-Founders are a husband and wife team who own the Washington Square Hotel. Judy is a third-generation hotelier and her love of food and entertaining grew out of a childhood spent at her grandfather’s Manhattan Beach Hotel in Brooklyn.
A proud Villager for more than 35 years, Judy has developed a very strong attachment to the community where she now lives and works. She served as an appointed member of Community Board #2 for nearly 15 years, and as an executive member of the Washington Square Association.
Marc joined the Washington Square Hotel team in 2002 after 25 years as sales and marketing executive for the Bertelsmann Music Group. The son of well-known Hollywood photographer and author Murray Garrett, Marc was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and lived just steps off the famed Venice Beach boardwalk. He immediately felt at home when he moved to New York in 1997, settling into yet another bohemian neighborhood, Greenwich Village. He embraced its diversity, the great restaurants, and its unique mix of artists, actors, musicians and businesspeople.
Contact: jpaul@wshotel.com | mgarrett@wshotel.com
DANNY KAPILIAN is a Brooklyn-based producer of original live events, touring productions and festivals. Premier presenters of Kapilian productions include Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center, BAM, the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood, London’s Barbican Center, Sydney Opera House, and the Montreal, Newport, New Orleans, North Sea, and Montreux Jazz Festivals. Danny has presented great artists of every genre, among them Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan, Ravi Shankar, Lou Reed, James Taylor, Snarky Puppy, Herbie Hancock, David Byrne, Roberta Flack, Miles Davis, Tina Turner, Ornette Coleman, Alan Cumming, XTC, John Cage, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Laura Mvula, Wynton Marsalis, La Santa Cecilia, Rufus Wainwright, and George Clinton and P-Funk.
Contact: danny@kapilian.com
The Village Trip Board of Directors >>
The Village Trip is a 501(c)3 organization and all donations to it are tax-deductible.
The Village Trip on Wikipedia >>
For a brief history of the Festival since its inception in 2018.